Where is your centre of balance? By Joni Bentley
Every living thing is slightly – or considerably – crooked. It’s perfectly natural.
But when this crookedness is left uncorrected, it causes problems. So people practice yoga, include stretching in their daily routine, and go to chiropractors, massage therapists, and other body workers.
Your horse can’t tell you when he’s feeling out of whack. But you know there’s something not quite right when ...
• Your horse lacks rhythm and impulsion
• His back swings down, instead of up
• His contact with the bit is unstable
• He lacks lightness and ease of movement.
In a straight horse, the centre of balance lies in the centre of the horse’s torso – where the diagonal lines cross in the drawing at left.
In a crooked horse, the centre of balance leaves this central point. In a right-handed horse, it’s displaced forwards and along the diagonal from the left hind quarter to the right shoulder.
When the centre of balance deviates in this way, the crookedness weaves itself into an intricate web throughout the body, creating a host of soundness and schooling problems.
When you know how to balance your own and your horse’s diagonal pathways, you have the key to unlock these habitual, imprinted patterns laid down in the body over many years.
And when you unlock those patterns, you can naturally and easily begin to correct symptomatic problems such as the four beat canter, unlevel diagonals at the trot, bridle lameness, wrong canter lead, and so on ... and on!
So how do you balance the diagonals and begin to unlock the patterns?
Start by understanding the biomechanics of crookedness!
Understanding the imbalance
Looking more closely, you can see that the horse in illustration 2 above isn’t supporting himself equally on all four legs. Instead, the left hind leg pushes sideways, creating a diagonal pathway thrust through to the right shoulder.
As you can imagine – and as you can see in the drawings – this throws off the horse’s overall balance out of alignment.
Because the left hind isn’t taking its fair share of the weight, the centre of gravity is pushed forward into the right shoulder, forcing the right foreleg to take up the slack. With this imbalance, the right hind leg struggles to do its job of stepping up under the centre of gravity – which only increases the load on the overburdened right shoulder.
And because the right shoulder is forced to support extra weight, the muscles under the right shoulder blade bind themselves closely to the underlying ribs, struggling to withstand the diagonal thrust of the left hind. This severely restricts the right shoulder’s range of motion, so the right foreleg simply can’t swing forward as freely – or as far – as it should.
As you can imagine, all of this puts great strain on the horse’s joints as well as on his muscles. All that probably sounds technical and complicated. Reading it in words doesn’t convey the impact on the body. So stop for a moment, and do what riders have done since the dawn of time: imagine you’re the horse. (If it helps – go ahead and get down on all fours!)
Tighten the muscles down the left side of your torso. Feel how your left hind leg isn’t supporting you, but is instead pushing forward diagonally into your right shoulder. Feel how this throws your whole body off balance, unevenly distributing your weight, forcing your right shoulder to tuck in to support you, shoving your right hind leg out of alignment.
It’s not very comfortable – and it’s not very easy to move freely, especially in a right-hand turn – is it?
When you really feel for yourself the actual experience of crookedness, you’ll begin to understand why a horse might play up more on one rein then the other! (Of course, in a left-handed horse the effects occur on the opposite side – but the imbalance and the horse’s discomfort are essentially the same.)
Hollow on the left, stiff to the right
In describing this crookedness in a right-handed horse (a horse who drives from the left hind towards the right foreleg, as described above), we’d call him hollow on the left and stiff to the right.
That might sound strange, because the left (hollow) side is actually the side that’s inflexible and not bending – i.e., it’s the side that’s stiff.
In order for the horse to bend to the right, he must release the contraction through the left side. (Try it yourself: sitting upright and keeping your seat solidly in place, tip your body to the right. Notice how the muscles along the left side of your torso have to relax and stretch?)
So we say he’s “stiff to the right” because he can’t release that contraction to bend towards the right. It’s a sort of shorthand that’s really saying that the horse is “stiff and can’t bend to the right”!
How can you unlock the crookedness?
When you understand the biomechanics of crookedness within your horse’s body and within your own, you hold – as I mentioned before – the keys to unlocking the crooked patterns and restoring natural balance and find the centre point of gravity for you both.
Winter is coming! To help you pamper yourself a little through the long cold winter months and still keep your training going to enhance your riding performance next summer – and to help keep your horse sound! – I’m planning several dismounted workshops. These workshops will be held in nice warm halls around the country at very affordable prices.
The workshops teach you how to
• Understand your own individual crookedness
• Understand your horse’s individual crookedness
• Use your own and your horse’s diagonal pathways to unlock one-sidedness
• Allow both yourself and your horse to come naturally back into the centre point where the diagonal pathways cross
• Prepare yourself to experience simple, effective, powerful, classical riding!
No matter how resistant you may feel your horse is, he’s always available to change as you change. But when you’re struggling, he can sense it – a horse always knows when you’re not “walking your talk”, and will just carry on walking his walk.
The winter workshops will be in the following area:
Sussex, Kent, Essex, Surrey. If you would like join us or host a workshop out of or in the above areas please email us or call for a chat.
Introducing a unique DVD home study course written especially for thinking riders who care about their own and their horse's well being.
In this DVD home-study course, you’ll learn how to turn your riding around and find a middle ground with clarity and ease, where your horse is happy to meet. Plus it’s available with video feed back from Joni. No matter where you live in the world Joni can help you using Skype, YouTube and phone.
Special Holiday Offer!
Buy one get one free! Buy the two-DVD set for yourself, and get another DVD FREE! Great Christmas present for a friend!
Find more information about this offer – and learn about my upcoming workshops – at my website www.jonibentley.co.uk No internet no problem call me for a chat 01442 402756 mobile 07771811561.
